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A: FROM MENTOR JOAN LUSK. To read Joan's
bio click here.
I'm sure that native speakers and readers of Arabic
and Hebrew and
other languages that are written right-to-left would ask what
the
advantage is of reading right to left! Probably the choice
is
totally arbitrary, like driving on one side of the road or
the other.
Possibly there is _some_ connection between the choice and
the
tendency of right-handedness to be more common... but I doubt
that.
I looked for statistics on left-handedness in different cultures,
but
didn't find any , not quickly.
http://duke.usask.ca/~elias/left/groups.htm gave an amazing
list of
things that might correlate with left-handedness, but other
sites
point out that there's no really universally accepted definition
of
handedness, so how can we do statistics!
A: FROM MENTOR CHRISTINE. M. KUTA. To read Christine's bio
click here.
There actually isn't much of an advantage in languages
reading one way or
the other. There is, however, an advantage to languages reading
only one way
because you always know which end of the line of text to begin
reading. The
earliest written languages were written such that the writing
went one way on
the first line and then came back the other way on the next
and so on, so the
writing essentially snaked down the page (or the scroll, or
whatever). After
a while, people began to make choices as to which way writing
ought to go
consistently and some cultures chose left to right and others
chose right to
left.
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